Be a man about it and use a magnet pointing at a torrent.

This actually works.

Not everyone wants to be a man, you know.

I find it hilarious how despite endless bad press the giant data pump that is bittorrent just keeps on grinding without anyone behind the wheel, no updates, no bug fixes, and no interruption. People can scream, ball their fists and stomp their foot on the ground but daddy's money cant shut it down.

We should all feel very embarresed such a thing is possible.

You can apparently write software and/or create protocols that measure their success in moaning about revenue loss.

maybe because bittorrent is genuinely useful and far from abandoned as most shops that regularly distribute large blobs use it.

the political kerfuffle because drm/dmca really has nothing to do with it but i can't shake the feeling that you are involved at this level. god bless

It has something to do with it. The internet enables control over what you talk about and share even with those close to you. We seem to like controlling others where we can. It doesnt seem al that bad but our benevolent corporate overlord dont represent the true madness of our kind. They havent categorized an untermensh nor refer to people as animals, we get to complaint about and mock our leaders. We have an elaborate system of law. One day people will no doubt wake up and it is all gone or it will gradually errode away.

Laws that require changing our entire civilisation and culture are not your friend. You dont want to search everones house to check if they own a radio or tv. If that happens depends on who is asking. It isnt a static group. It might begin with heroic crime fighters but we can expand or replace the effort with new business logic. First we need to prevent you from reading a harry potter registered in someone elses name, then we need to be able to take your music purchases away from you until eventually we need to lock you up for subscribing to the wrong youtube channel 30 years ago.

It isnt actually as absurd as not having video on websites in an afordable way.

All those people working at youtube and all of those giant servers. It takes a truly monumental effort to use the wrong technology.

I have to watch ads to pay for it? Advertisers have to influence content to pay for it? Our best men to keep the eyeballs on ads to pay for it?

I have over a thousand yt subs to deleted channels for a laundry list of resons. There use to be threaded discussions and video replies. It all had to go to pay for it?

All the horrors of central planning without the nice things the communists prommised us?

All that to make sure some people get paid for things other people did 70 years ago?

If that is what it costs they should not be paid. I hope little jimmy downloads all of their movies, every tv show, all the video games, all of their music, all of their books and all of their published papers.

They wanted little jimmy to pay for singing happy birthday on video. Imagine the money they lost that day. All of those birthdays!

We could have had birthday inspection squad teams. Fight the crime at the source.

> I have over a thousand yt subs

that sounds a lot

I think i got to 2500ish of which about 1000 vanished.

The trick is to look for things not discovered by the masses. The reason (i wont call it a mistake) is almost always not publishing frequently enough. (Not that i dont watch popular things or everything in between.) Infrequent publishers dont get very noisy.

> protocols that measure their success in moaning about revenue loss.

Yeah. The so-called "Net Vicarious Loss" (NVL) protocols :)

But people will tell you that software cannot be expected to work reliably and cannot function without a billion dollar corporation pushing constant updates.

Even the ‘Bible’ app requires constant updates, I thought the final version was released quite some time ago

> without a billion dollar corporation pushing constant updates

... even when, sometimes, it is those very updates that bring the software down.-

The simplest thing would be to simply link to a Youtube video, perhaps with a small warning that it will take them to Youtube which uses trackers. You could even make the link an image that is the thumbnail of the video.

Not the prettiest or purest solution, but very simple.

I've seen youtube embeds be overlaid and say things like "this embed carries tracking, click here to load inline at your own peril or here to watch on original site" or something to that effect.

Can't recall where though.

I believe duckduckgo offers a similar warning when playing videos from search results.

It also uses YouTube-nocookie.com, which turns off targeted advertising or tracking. You are still tracked, but views aren’t linked or ads aren’t linked to your account. YouTube docs call Privacy Enhanced Mode for Embeds.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en#zippy...

Medium did (does?) this when you have DNT enabled. Several GDPR-compliant sites do the same, though many use their embeds as a means to track people into clicking the "accept all tracking" button.

Duck duck go?

What I do (first of all for performance) is use YouTube links and have a script that prepends each `a.embed` link with an "embed" button. The button turns the link into an embed and back.

https://dbohdan.com/assets/embed.js

Neat solution.-

I disagree. That is the prettiest and the purest solution!

The "purest" solution would be to host the video yourself.

Turn your videos into HLS playlists (.m3u8) or mp4 and host the individual video files behind Cloudflare. Serve them on the frontend using JW Player or some other JS video player and from the backend using a $5 DigitalOcean droplet that serves the files from block storage.

You’ll have to learn some ffmpeg incantations but the bandwidth will be free and your total costs will be the tiny VM and block storage. Might even be able to point Cloudflare at a public bucket and skip the VM.

If you need to store and serve several terabytes of content, a dedicated server instead of block storage will be your best bet (again with Cloudflare), you’ll just need to figure out offsite backup and restoration.

Doesn't cloudflare TOS forbid video content?

Huh, looks like it does unless you use Cloudflare Stream. Thankfully this is a throwaway account :-)

I think by keeping the HLS segments at a few megabytes each and not using a file extension in the URL, I've slipped through the cracks.

(My religion forbids me from recognizing any terms of service that haven't been given the three blessings of the matriarch)

I think it's more likely you just don't generate enough traffic for them to care to stop you. I think the main issue is that their business model of not charging for bandwidth doesn't work well for video. As long as you aren't using a ton of bandwidth, they won't care you are doing some video.

I’ve heard that third blessing is pretty much impossible to get.

There hasn’t been a matriarch since the last one died in 1842. The two last surviving religious orders with voting rights have been in a deadlock ever since because they can’t agree on what color sesame seed belongs in “Everything but the Bagel” seasoning.

Saint Trader Joes tried to unite them by using both light and dark sesame years ago, but there’s just too much bad blood for them to work together. We are still waiting for the chosen one that will bring balance to the bagel.

Ahh, the utter tragedy of the Sesamoschism of 1842. The sad thing is that the deadlock between the Correctly Righteous Matriarchaleanbageloptomistrists and the Righteously Correct Matriarchaleanbageloptomistrists all comes down to one member’s error in mixing toasted light sesame seeds with raw dark sesame seeds, and neither side being able to agree which member needed to suffer the rites of immaculate defenestration.

May the bagel balanced be.

Yes, then in 1863 we had a brief window of hope as Frau Blücher, a charismatic blind preacher, wrote her famous “Two Theses” on a bagel bag: “1. I cannot taste the difference; 2. It all looks the same in your stomach.” This ecumenical message sadly did not endure and she too was thrown out of a first floor window.

*Horse Whinnies in the distance*

It's not quite that clearcut:

> Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files.

- https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...

Reading between the lines a bit: they really only care if you're using Cloudflare to front a site whose primary purpose is to deliver video content, and lots of it (like, say, if you're running a tube site or a livestreaming site). They don't care about web sites which happen to incidentally include a small amount of video content.

> Serve them on the frontend using JW Player or some other JS video player

Just make sure that player supports right click->Save I'd much rather download and view a video in VLC than somebodies janky JS player

<pkg-manager> install mpv ytdlp

give site-url to mpv

watch video

PS:

vlc can play from urls too, but isn't as compatible with the way most sites implement it

You might, but the UX of that process for a 57s video is... below standard expectation.

why wouldn't you host your own video file? I don't understand this dependency on youtube

Streaming is important, especially for longer videos. I don't believe any static hosting site supports video streaming.

I suppose any reasonable browser can play off a HTTP stream. I not so sure it would be able to navigate in the stream easily (like clicking at a particular time on the progress bar), because the bitrate is highly variable.

What else am I missing?

Dynamic bitrate is the main one - the browser & server coordinate to figure out the highest video quality the user can watch without stuttering/buffering.

The client can do that 100% client side, you can serve pure static files with a JS player that handles the streaming. All you have to do is chunk the video into small 2-5 second chunks at a variety of nitrates and list them all in an .m3u8 playlist file if the right format.

I know because I explored this for a hobby project of a movie I liked. See here: http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/

Use your network inspector to observe your browser requesting the individual chunks over time. Note that my server is just an Apache2 file server.

Pretty cool!

always wondered how this handles prebuffering. (i.e. max-prebuffer = chunk-size) ?

> any reasonable browser can play off a HTTP stream

most video players also support http and there is no problem with just putting files up.

imho all the streaming tech, drm, hls, adaptive bitrate selection and whatnot, are just commercial fads to increase margin

Adaptive bitrate selection seems important if your clients have narrow or unstable bandwidth (e.g. mobile), or when you may get constrained by outgoing bandwidth (/. effect aka HN crowd).

imo this is mainly due to the constraint of keeping clientside pre-buffering as low as possible.

sending the whole file at network-speed usually works fine, but maybe uneconomical at scale especially if coupled with users that skip a lot and tend to not watch the whole thing anyway.

Amazon S3 (static hosting) supports streaming[1], but doesn’t transfer the hosting “cost” to the user as YT does.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/tutori...

The video is 57 seconds long. Should be fine ~ kinda.

My host doesn't support video. If I point <video> at a file it plays just fine but the server doesn't do partial content so the player crashes or stutters if the user attempts to seek outside what was downloaded. When the whole thing is downloaded it works smoothly but it isn't quite acceptable. There is no easy html way to preserve the seek/progress bar and `Accept-Ranges: none` has the same meaning as not setting the header(?)

I cant seem to find answers or bugs, all I find "make sure your server supports partial content" which really isn't required to make it work.

Right but if you have your own ip address and fiber connection that should be enough for narrow-casting.

I'm surprised to see my inexpressible urges documented by others. I'm with these people 100% right down to why a sailboat.

I tried to do this with an apartment building. The building is too large to focus on a the detail I need. A 43' sailboat is actually a great size to prototype on.

I have a signed P&S and hope to be hard core boat living sometime in September. The idea will be the studio time I get while on land will be much sweeter if I spend a lot of time on a boat.

The boat is self-contained so my aspirations won't effect people paying rent.

The building has everything I need to host my own streaming. I don't know that I will ever publish content, but if I do it will be entirely self-hosted. If the audience is so vast that brings everything to a halt, things will start functioning again once the hordes get bored.

Think of all the wasted brain power content-creators go through to keep YouTube at bay.

I believe content should be the residue of the work. I think once publishing is the funding source it may distort the work.

You can just turn your video file into a bunch of HSL or MPEG Dash segments and store then as static file with a playlist/manifest file next to them, and tada! you now have video streaming in your static hosting site.

Correct. Progressive MP4 also do the trick. Many open-source tool such as ffmpeg (generalist), gpac (specialized in this and leveraging ffmpeg), etc. in the area.

most ppl probably fall into the category where self-hosting their content is viable, though most also don't know anything about it, hence the outsourcing

This is what I ended up doing. I used HandBrake to reduce the video to a reasonable size and then just put the MP4 on the site like anything else. I guess I'm getting a little carried away with my "minimalist" attitude in this case, where I want the video to be super light. Looks like a 2 minute video is about 4mb. Not great but not that bad compared to other modern websites either.

This will work for now but my mind still wonders if there isn't a better way to reduce the size of these. I'll continue to experiment.

> Anyway, I’d like to NOT embed YouTube. Maybe I will anyway, but I wonder if anyone has alternatives, especially if they are scrappy, tiny alternatives like those that I imagine 100r might produce.

I use lite-youtube on my site for this reason. Instead of embedding the YT player directly, it shows a thumbnail that pulls in the embed when you click to watch the video.

That way visitors aren't tracked unless they actively click the thumbnail to watch the embedded player. Iirc it also works as just a link so visitors have the option to cmd+click or right-click-copy to avoid the embed.

You should check out my book then. I realized that everyone was starting to, not write books, but that they were writing instructional books teaching about how people should write books. I said to myself, "well let's teach them how to do THAT instead". One step more metain the game. Anyway, my book is about how to make videos to teach people how to write books, things like marketing and profit-maxxing. There's a lot of great pedagogy in there.

Also what kind of name is "100 rabbits". Reminscent of "50 blessing" from hotline miami